Category Archives: Innovation

02.05.09
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DEN: Eric Ulken: Beyond the story-centric model of the universe

After appearing virtually at a few Digital Editors Network events at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, I finally made the trip to appear in person. I really enjoyed Alison Gow talking about live blogging the credit crunch for several Trinity-Mirror sites using CoverItLive.

Eric Ulken, formerly the LATimes.com editor of interactive technology, spoke about an issue dear to my heart: Moving beyond the story as the centre of the journalism universe. It’s one of the reasons that I chose to be a digital journalist is that I think it brings together the strengths of print, audio and video while also adding some new story-telling methods such as data and visualistions. Eric talked about the projects he worked on at the Times to explore new ways of telling stories.

Eric started off by talking about the history of news articles.

The story article so far

  • born 17th Century
  • served us well for about 400 years
  • lots of words (800-1000 words on average)
  • unstructured, grey and often boring.

“What else is there in the toolbox?” he asked.

Some examples: (Eric suffered the dreaded no internet, links in presentation problem so am a little link light on this. You can see examples that Eric has worked on from his portfolio.)

  • text trick – lists, tables, timelines, (Eric mentioned Dipity as one way to easily create a timeline, but said it was “not quite there”. He also mentioned MIT’s Simile project (which has ‘graduated’ and is now hosted on Google Code). Licenced for use under BSD licence, it’s is easily something for more news organisations to use.) Other text formats include the q&a and what he called the q&no, eg the New York Time tech blog. They put up questions for Steve Jobs before MacWorld. His Steve-ness never answers them, but it lays out the agenda.
  • blogs are the new articles
  • photo galleries as lists, timelines
  • stand-alone UGC
  • video: short-form, packages
  • mapping, charts, data visualisation
  • database applications visualisation.

I think this is really important for journalists to understand now. They have to be thinking about telling stories in other formats than just the story. Journalist-programmer ninja Adrian Holovaty has a number of ways that stories can be re-imagined and enhanced with structured data. News has to move on from the point where the smallest divisible element of news is the article. News organisations are adding semantic information such as tags, as we have at the Guardian.

But beyond that, we have to think of other ways to present information and tell stories. As more journalists shift from being focused solely on the print platform to multi-platform journalism, one of the most pressing needs is to raise awareness of these alternate story-telling elements. Journalists, outside of the development departments and computer-assisted reporting units, need to gather the data around a story. It needs to become an integral part of newsgathering. If a department inside of your organisation is responsible with gathering this data, your data library needs to be made accessible and easily searchable by journalists. If it sounds daunting, especially for small shops, then use Google Docs as an interim solution. This is also an area ripe with opportunities for cooperation between universities and news organisations.

Eric gave one example of this non-story-centric model for news. “We did a three-way mashup”, he said. They brought together the computer-assisted reporting team, the graphics team and Eric’s team.

They worked with a reporter on the City desk. She wanted to chronicle every homicide in LA County. In 2007, there were 800 murders. She did the reporting in a blog format. It might not have been the best format, but it was easy to set up. She started building up a repository of information. I was begging people to get the tech resources to build a database. We built a database on top of the blog. We took data from the County Coroner. We took gender, race and age and put it in a database which was crossed linked to the blog. We added a map. You could filter based on age or race on the map. The result was two things. It was a way to look at the data in aggregate, and it was a way to drill down through the interface to the individual record. They took public data, original reporting and contributions from users.

“One of the things that is challenging is getting the IT side to understand what it is actually that you do,” he said.There are more tech people who are interested in journalism probably than there are journalist who are able and willing to learn the intricacies of programming.

When the floor was opened to questions, I wasn’t surprised that this one came up.

Question: Could the LATimes get rid of the print and remain profitable?
Answer: No. Revenue from online roughly covers the cost of newsroom salaries, not the benefits, not for ad staff. I don’t think he was saying that the LATimes had figured it out. He had been saying that for some time before he said it publicly. It was for morale. He was saying that it is not inconceivable for the website to pay in the future.
“There is a point where this cycle ends of cutting staff and cutting newshole,” he said.

UPDATE: And you can see the presentation on SlideShare:

Beyond the story-centric model of the universe

View more presentations from eulken. (tags: online journalism)
02.04.09
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Commenting on public documents

I was impressed by the Writetoreply.org idea to post the Digital Britain interim report on a Comment-Press installation to allow people to comment on it. You can read some of the background to the project from Tony Hirst, who flagged this up on the BBC Backstage list. It really ticks a lot of public service boxes for me, and I think this is something that journalism oganisations could and should do. Hats off to Joss Winn for putting this together.

This is just the latest example of posting public documents for public comment. Gavin Bell did this with the European Constitution, and the Free Software Foundation hosted an amazing project that allowed people to comment on the GNU General Public Licence version 3. A heatmap showed down to the word level the parts of the document that were generating the most comment, and it had a very intuitive interface.

Out of the GPL project grew a service called Co-ment. I was able to grab a copy of the report, convert it to RTF and upload it. The basic level of service only allows 20 people to comment on it, and this is just my cut-and-paste coding proof of concept. If you’d like to comment, drop me an e-mail, and I’ll add you to the list, bearing in mind that I only have 20 slots available. But the public service journo-geek in me loves stuff like this.

Have a play. I’d like to see how this works. It’s already got a lot of ideas flowing.

01.21.09
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Washington Post’s TimeScale feature for Obama’s inauguration

I’ve been blogging about some of the new ways that news websites covered the inauguration and collaborated with their audiences. One interesting presentation was a feature called TimeSpace at the Washington Post. Simon Willison and I were taking a look at the guts of this, and it appears that they have built a platform that will allow them to quickly build features like this in the future.

TimeSpace one of those things that I do wonder who will use this and whether it was promoted enough on the front page. I like it, but I am always keen to see if this is something that appeals to a wider audience. I do believe that the geo-tagging elements that they have added have a wider application. The inauguration really highlighted a lot of new ways of showing this historic event. I’ll be interested to see what projects were one-offs and which ones have staying power.

01.21.09
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Obama’s Transition team talks Technology, Innovation and Government Reform

President Barack Obama has already begun his first day in office, but it’s interesting to look back at his transition, which has won praise in Washington as one of the most organised and disciplined in history. During his transition, he launched a website, change.gov to not only outline his policies but also to seek input. This video is worth watching. Technology and change is challenging for any organisation whether you’re in the business of governing a country or running a news service. Obama’s Technology, Innovation and Government Reform talk about how they faced these challenges.

01.14.09
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How to run a news organisation in a down economy

The year has started out with more hand wringing about the predictable (and predicted), but very dire, economic situation of newspapers, particularly in the US. News organisations’ belief that quality will be their saviour is usually the result of projections of their own information consumption patterns and standards for quality on their audience, motivations that their audience may or may not share.

Newspapers are not maintaining the audiences necessary to support their current costs. Steve Yelvington just wrote this post about the bad news for newspapers and rays of hope, which is a comment that he left on Jeff Jarvis’ list of newspaper bad news from 2008:

At the core, it’s not an advertising problem. Local businesses still need to reach potential local customers, and they’re willing (although certainly not eager) to pay for results.

It’s primarily a failure to attract and retain a commercially relevant audience that’s breaking the newspaper business model.

I agree with Steve that multi-platform, multi-revenue stream businesses are necessary to survive, and many publications are in the process of the wrenching change required to achieve that.

But there is another, equally important, way to make the necessary change for news organisations looking to survive in this very challenging economic environment, and that is to disrupt their own costs (and I don’t mean cutting head count even further). While some blame digital technology and the internet for the death of newspapers, I would argue that embracing disruptive digital technology could lead to substantial cost savings.

Off the shelf, pro-sumer gear straddles the line between consumer and professional kit but costs substantially less. Open source software can extend the life of aging computers in the office, can run the servers and handle most CMS functions. Open-source content-management systems might not be ready for the largest sites, but most small- to medium-sized news sites could easily use Drupal or WordPress for their entire site. In the hands of a competent contractor with the occasional tweaking from a third-party vendor, the site will easily cope with moderate traffic.

I even think there is a possible radical model where there is a small office that handles core administrative and sales functions but the journalists are by and large dispersed, tele-commuting as much as possible. They would work as close to the story and their sources as possible and file remotely. They can use Skype or IM to communicate with their managers, and Twitter-like service Yammer to keep in touch with each other and help prevent a sense of isolation. Maybe I’m advocating this because as a journalist who worked in a foreign bureau and often out in the field for several years, this type of working seems natural to me.

A lot of successful digital content businesses already work on this model, and I think that we’ll see more competition in this space from within the industry. In this downturn, digital outcasts made redundant by traditional news organisations will start their own boot-strapped news organisations, potentially pushing many of their former employers to the wall, unless the incumbents radically, not incrementally, remake themselves. It is only a matter of time. The digital disrupters will run very lean, digitally-focused businesses with multiple revenue streams, as Steve suggests.

For a model of the thinking that will drive this type of business, look to this post by Eric Ries HOW TO: Raise Money in a Down Economy on Mashable. He serves as a venture advisor for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and talks about trying to raise money for a venture in 2004, when scepticism remained after the dot.com crash. His advice is:

The most important thing you can do to improve your chances of raising money in a down economy is to build a great company. A great startup is more than just a miniature version of a great large company. All of its process should be focused on innovating and learning. Today, it’s possible to use a combination of free and open source software, community-generated content, and agile software development to bring new products to market with extremely low cost.

Add professionally created and curated content and apply this model for an innovation-led business, and you’ll find a way out of this perfect storm affecting the newspaper industry. It’s eerily similar to the Newspaper Next project recommendations for good reason.

However, I ask those of you toiling in the industry right now. How close is this disruptive way of doing business to the environment at your news organisation?

  • Is your company focused on learning and innovation?
  • To what extent is your company using free and open-source software?
  • Is your company focused on delivering information while cutting costs?
  • Is your company looking for new ways to partner with and build new relationships with your audience?

Cutting costs doesn’t just have to happen through job cuts. Companies need empower their people to work smarter, spend money more wisely, and focus on doing more with less. There are many ways to achieve this, and I think we’ll see experimentation and innovation this year as the economic crisis deepens. Necessity will be the mother of re-invention.

01.06.09
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“OK open systems beat great closed systems every time”

The title of this post is a quote, via Steve Yelvington, from Prodigy’s Vice President of marketing around the time that the Web arrived and changed the online game. Usually I just reference links like this in Delicious, but Steve’s post Early to the game but late to learn how to play needs a little more attention.

In the current business climate for newspapers, Steve brings a wealth of experience and history that few folks in the industry have and, as he points out, it is not that newspaper didn’t try to adapt but that they tried to adapt the web to their existing business rather than adapting for the web. Newspapers tried to keep their closed systems as they moved online, locking their content in online services. The web might have arrived ‘pathetic and weak’ but it was ‘open and extensible’, says Steve, and it eventually buried online services like Prodigy, Compuserve and even AOL. He quotes Jack Schafer from a Slate piece titled “How Newspapers Tried to Invent the Web:”

From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions.

I’ve long fought against the re-purposing reflex of shovelware, mindlessly slapping content from another medium onto the web. As we move to integrated newsrooms, we’re often still treating the web as just another distribution channel that simply has to be optimised for Google. Here is why it isn’t. To quote Steve:

Many of us who were there at the time knew that human interaction, not newspaper reading, would be the most powerful motivator of online usage. Certainly I knew it; I had run a dialup bulletin board for years as a hobby. But as hundreds of newspapers rushed to “go online,” few even bothered to ask basic questions about content strategy. It was, many declared as of they were saying something wise, “just another edition.”

But it’s not.

If human interaction is the ‘killer app’ of the internet, which I agree with Steve it is, how would this make a news site different? It is only in the so-called Web 2.0 era that we finally started adding social elements into our news web sites. And if human interaction is primary motivator of online usage, can we as journalists fail to interact and still hope to remain relevant? Open systems are not just about a choice of technology. The philosophy of open systems is also about how we use technology. Open is a philosophy that drives us to use technology to bolster human interaction. It is why Steve talks about the mission statement of his news site as being to increase the social capital in the communities Morris serves.

Jay Rosen has been doing a lot of thinking about closed versus open editorial systems, and he characterised this comment as one of his clearest comparisons yet of the two systems:

The strength of a closed system is that it has controls, in same sense that an accounting system puts controls in place. Stories are assigned, reported, edited and checked (copy edited) by a team using a protocol, or newsroom standard. These are the hallmarks of the closed system. The controls create the reliability, right?

Versus:

Open systems take advantage of cheap production tools and the magic distribution system of the Web. This leads to a flood of “cheap” production in the blogosphere, some of which is valuable and worth distributing in wider rings, much of which is not. Thus, a characteristic means of creating value online is what I called the intelligent filter to do that sorting and choosing.

If you look at successful open systems, they don’t try to prevent “bad,” unreliable or low quality stories from being created or published. They don’t try to prevent the scurrilous. But the Los Angeles Times would. Typically, successful sites within open systems “filter the best stuff to the front page.” And this is how they try to become reliable, despite the fact that anyone can sign up and post rants.

That way of creating trust (or reliability) is different than the way a closed system–like the health team at Time magazine–does it. Therefore the ethics will be different.

And he talks about hybrid systems, which is where I think some of the most interesting work is going on. We live in an AND world not an OR world, and I fear sometimes journalists’ tendency to paint the world in black and white infects our approach to our own way of working.

For me, I don’t use technology simply because I’m neophilic. I use it because it helps me do better journalism, in a way that is more useful to people in my network, or as Dan Gillmor says, the people formerly known as the audience. The internet as an open system means that my methods aren’t a fixed destination but an ever evolving, extensible process that adapts as the network changes, whether I conceive of the network in terms of the technology or the people I’m interacting with. Through all this my core journalistic values and ethics haven’t changed. That’s the constant.

I’m feeling a little philosophical at the start of the New Year. I am an online journalist. If the road trip I took for the US elections reminded me of anything, it reminded me of the power of networked journalism, which in terms of both the technology and the human connectedness increases almost constantly. Let’s just look at the expanding reach of mobile phones and data. In 1999, I got my first mobile modem and started to be freed from my desk. It ran at 9600 baud, slow even then. In 2009, I used a DSL-class mobile network card, and when I was on the move, I used a Nokia N82, which like the iPhone and Blackberry, allowed me to continue to use key internet services like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. The network is not only mobile, it is on my mobile.

Open systems are a huge opportunity for journalists, not a threat to our professional livelihoods. We journalists don’t have to limit ourselves to closed systems, we have a vast range of open systems that can support and improve our work. I know that 2008 ended with a lot of anxiety for many journalists, much of it from a sense that our professional lives were out of our control. But by embracing the network, you can start taking back control of your professional destiny.

01.05.09
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A new web discipline: Social Functionality Design

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes a website social, and how different types of social functionality could fit together to create a satisfying experience for the people who use the website. Partly this is because I’m working closely with a Canadian publishing start-up called Book Oven to do just that – design their social functionality. We are still at the very early stages of website development, with a very small pre-alpha test going on at the moment which should lead into a fuller-featured alpha in the next few months.

What is interesting and, to my mind admirable too, is that they started thinking holistically about the social aspects of the site from the very beginning, so that sociability is built right into its fabric, rather than being treated as a bolt-on afterwards. So often I see otherwise promising sites fail to reach their potential because they’ve simply tacked on some forums, and maybe a half-baked messaging system, and leave their social functionality at that. Communities will still form, but they miss out on lots of interaction that could otherwise really enrich the user’s experience.

So what sort of things are we thinking through when we’re considering social functionality design? My first focus was to think about the social objects around which people might want to communicate, and what implications that would have for different modes of communication. Obviously, members’ activities (and I’m being deliberately vague about what they are for now!) are one set of social objects, but so are the members themselves, so the tools have to allow people to aggregate conversations around each object separately – I don’t just want one big bucket with all the conversations in, but will need to have multiple ways to slice and dice the conversation so that it makes sense for me at that moment, in that context.

I have also been considering the way in which people develop relationships with each other, and the effect that the architecture of the site may have on the way people build trust. This is all intimately related to privacy gradients, understanding the way that people can move through a site, and what access to different areas of the site signifies. People have different ways of forming relationships online. Some like to watch and learn what someone is like from observation, others jump straight into conversation, and yet others will plunge into intimate relationships at what might seem like an alarming speed! How does the site design facilitate (or hinder) these behaviour patterns?

And what about people’s motivations for using the site? Why will they visit us? What will they want to do there? How will they do it? Understanding the different ways that people may wish to interact with the site and each other is essential to understanding how to structure it, and it’s not just about traditional information architecture or user experience, but also about understanding the possible influences of human cognitive biases.

Once we start looking more deeply at people’s motivations, the dark side of human nature reveals itself, and we have to consider conflict resolution. The community can do a lot to self-police, if you give them the tools to do so, but there is always a need to understand what the worst case scenario might be. What you could do to prevent your site or tool being used by one user as a big stick to beat another user with? My personal feeling here is that the site should remain as neutral as possible, and let users sort out their problems off-site, but there are design and functionality implications even in that solution that should not be ignored.

And then there’s reputation management. Hierarchies emerge in all communities – it’s human nature to rank oneself against one’s peers, and to rank them against each other. How explicit does one make reputational tools? How could the reputation system be gamed? And how do you keep people honest? After all, whenever there is a reputation system, us humans do so love to game it.

I think there’s a new web discipline here, that of Social Functionality Design, that should sit alongside User Experience, Accessibility, and Information Architecture as key issues that website and application designers need to understand and apply. People are getting much more sophisticated in the way that they use the internet and their expectations of the social experience of being online are getting more and more nuanced. It’s just not enough anymore to only have forums or a messaging system.

When I look at the web, I am constantly disappointed that sites I love and use regularly seem to have put so little thought into just how their members are going to interact. Supporting sociability isn’t optional anymore. Sites need to think very hard about what they are doing and how, and they need to crack this nut sooner rather than later, because otherwise they are leaving their lunch out for someone else to eat.

01.05.09
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Wish list for better tools for journalism

I still like Twhirl for my personal Twitter-ing and Twibble for my mobile Twitter-ing, but I think TweetDeck is a stellar tool for Twitter power users including journalists. I keep it open on my desktop and occasionally look at the tag cloud from TwitScoop. Recently, I saw ‘Bethesda’ pop up in huge type on the tag cloud, and I was baffled as to why this Washington DC suburb should be spiking on Twitter. But the tweets linked to the story about a huge water main break in Bethesda 20 minutes before it aired on British TV news networks.

When I showed TweetDeck to one of our news bloggers here at the Guardian, he said he wished that the news wires worked like that.

  • Why don’t we have a tag cloud showing rising stories in wire feeds?
  • Why don’t we create our own in house Adobe Air apps that automatically aggregate based on those tags from social media sources?
  • Why aren’t our publishing tools as fast and user-friendly as blogging tools?

In 2009, I see almost endless opportunities to use third party sites, applications and services to do social media journalism. My wish list will drive the apps and services I use. What’s your wish list for 2009? What tool do you use outside of your office that you wish you had inside your newsroom to do journalism?

11.17.08
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Disrupt or be disrupted

more about “ Why do people listen to Michael Ros…“, posted with vodpod

Andy Dickinson has a post asking the question: Why do people listen to Michael Rosenblum? Andy thinks that Michael is worth listening to but that his approach doesn’t “work across the board”. At conferences, many in the room may be hearing Michael’s message for the first time, but Andy says:

As suprising as it may be to them, there are people in their organisations who are as knowledgable and passionate about video as he is. They may have more experience of the particular problems in their company and more direct suggestions to help solve them.

They may not give as good a show but they may give as good advice.

Suw sees the same thing in business. She is often called in as a consultant by people who agree with her, often passionately, but don’t have the political capital in their organisation to shake it from its inertia. They need a comrade in arms but have to buy one in.

Returning to Andy’s post, I think another, possibly more important question is: Why do people nod in agreement at conferences and then completely ignore Michael Rosenblum or other digital advocates, especially those in their own organisations? Frankly, Michael, Jeff Jarvis and many of us have been saying the same thing for years now. Digital technology will disrupt the business of journalism, and it presents a clear choice of either adopting and adapting the technology or watching your business crumble. However, we shouldn’t mistake the collapse of some businesses as evidence of lightning fast change. This has been a slow motion train wreck. This is the predictable outcome of the economics of disruptive digital technologies, which is why I’m mystified people continue to ignore this fact, carry on with business as usual and then feign surprise as their businesses implode.

We’ve had decades to watch the digital revolution play out. As Tom Coates wrote in debunking the attack of the snails argument:

So here’s the argument – that perhaps broadcast won’t last forever and that technology is changing faster than ever before. So fast, apparently, that it’s almost dazzlingly confusing for people.

I’m afraid I think this is certifiable bullshit. There’s nothing rapid about this transition at all. It’s been happening in the background for fifteen years. So let me rephrase it in ways that I understand. Shock revelation! A new set of technologies has started to displace older technologies and will continue to do so at a fairly slow rate over the next ten to thirty years!

Tom wrote his post two and a half years ago, and yet journalism and media organisations continue to bemoan the rapid pace of change. In fact, this change is just the logical conclusion of decades-long trends that have been clear to anyone who was actually paying attention.

In some ways, it’s understandable. If you have a wonderfully lucrative business model like television or the de facto monopolies of big metro daily newspapers in the US, the first reaction is to protect the existing business model rather than adapt to meet the challenge of digital insurgents. It’s a perfectly reasonable response.

In other ways, it’s a complete failure of management replicated almost identically across several sectors of the media industry. Newspapers have been suffering declining readership for decades. Television has been facing fragmenting audiences for years under the threat of cable and satellite. This is the failure of vision by media management: They have focused on digital consumption patterns without adopting digital production methods and undercutting their own costs. And as the erosion of audience has accelerated, they have mainly cut costs by cutting staff instead of by adopting digital production and distribution technology.

At this late hour for many media companies the critical question is, when are you going to stop nodding your heads at conferences and get on with it? Not many of us in media will be able to go hat in hand like Northern Rock or General Motors and ask for billions to bail us out. I think that Mindy McAdams raises an important issue in the comments on Andy’s post:

News organizations seem particularly susceptible to “a prophet is without honor in his own land” — people inside the organization who spread Michael’s same message might be completely ignored, but management will hire Michael to come in and do his excellent presentation, and THEN they will ooo and ahh about it, acting as if it is brand-new.

A few things to realise in the age of digital disruption:

  1. Higher costs of production do not necessarily result in higher quality of products.
  2. Quality and brand do not equal media success.
  3. Broadcast=wedding. Anytime you put broadcast near technology in the same sentence, it’s like saying you want something for a wedding. Just triple the cost.
  4. Disrupt or be disrupted. Actively look for ways to disrupt your own business model with digital technologies before someone else does.
11.13.08
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Journalism: Hop on the Cluetrain

After seven weeks in the US for the elections, I’m behind in everything: Eating, sleeping and blogging. I’m going to be writing a lot about the experience and lessons learned in terms of the technology and in terms of the journalism. But, before I get into deep thoughts about the trip, I saw something that really resonated with me as I watched how social media covered these elections and where traditional media was sometimes successful in adapting to the world of social media and also how much further traditional media still has to go.

Tim Eby of WOSU, who I reconnected with at the Columbus Social Media Cafe, just tweeted:

Retweeting @amber_rae amazing social media presentation @andyangelos http://tinyurl.com/5eqmxg

The presentation by Andy Angelos, quotes the Cluetrain Manifesto:

Get out of the way so internetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets. The result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Just so a leap of logic isn’t necessary because I’ve found sometimes I make connections that others in my industry don’t:

Get out of the way so internetworked journalists can converse directly with internetworked people formerly known as the audience. The result will be a new kind of journalism. And it will be the most exciting journalism that we have ever engaged in.

That’s the lesson that I’ve learned from my trip. Discuss.